


The Insistence of Memory

by KarkaHatchlings



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, Damaged Goods, Gen, Implied Masturbation, Last wish, One-Sided Attraction, Patrol, Scourge of the Past, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 06:40:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20903279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KarkaHatchlings/pseuds/KarkaHatchlings
Summary: A tragic tale in which our performers are trapped by the power of a name and fickleness of remembrance.Come and partake, o reader mine.





	The Insistence of Memory

She remembered rain. On her twitching fingertips first, thrust out of the dirt. Then on her back when she breached up from the shallow grave with the tatters of armor hanging off her chassis. Then sluicing down her cranial shell and carrying away clinging clods of mud. She tasted the rain that slipped past plastic lips, tasted dirt and tangy rust. There was a little hovering drone shining a light on her. "That's good, but you're not done, we have to get moving." Not a drone, a ghost. 

It was a good, clear memory. Precious.

\---

It was something she could return to when her shattered thoughts evaded the light of recollection. Unbidden, it came to her at strange times, laden with significance. It served as a baseline: on waking from slumber under her dew-covered cloak on patrol, finishing a perfunctory meal at the coxinha place in Anchor district, blurring out on something her drone was trying to tell her. Not her drone, her ghost.

So, that was where she started, when she remembered to try.

The taste wasn’t dirt and rust, but gamy poultry, zesty herbs, and fried dough. She nipped off another piece of the pastry. The peristaltic action of her throat demolished it and dragged it down leaving only the flavor behind. The complex mechanics of this disposal of street food pulled her mind’s eye inward: flexing plastics, near-impervious to wear and degradation, routes and pathways carefully conforming to the constraints of a humanoid form, internal furnaces reducing organic materials to little more than carbon dust… The vendor was saying something, pointing.

She reached for her glimmer. Forgetting to pay happened all the time. The vendor pushed her hand away, smiling kindly. “No, no.” Did he know her? Forgetting she’d already paid happened all the time. He pointed past her, “them.”

The vendor was pointing at a man almost at her elbow. Safe in the City, she hadn’t noticed, hadn’t been looking. “I’m told you’re the best Hunter that Nicolano here knows.” The newcomer said it with a wry smile that acknowledged the inevitable frequency of such a claim. An accent she’d never be able to place burred his voice. Was that the vendor’s name?

“I, we,” he belatedly indicated another man, a mass of heavy armor standing further back from the food stall letting the foot traffic of the street break around him, “are putting together a fireteam.” Against the muddle of the past few minutes, details stood in perfect clarity. The man’s skin was clear, unmarked and his full lips revealed bright teeth when he smiled. A guardian. His little drone, shell oxidized green, hung above his shoulder regarding her with what she thought was suspicion. Not his drone, his ghost.

\---

Rain fell, chilly, driven and stinging out of a night sky dominated by the tattered rings of Saturn. It tapped on the ragged hood of her cloak as she slipped under a hole torn in the domed roof. A glance upward let it run across the faceplate of her helmet to smear her view for a second. Only a second. She had to stay alert. Fausten was a hulking shadow of armor and weaponry ahead within the darkness of the arcology’s ruined interior. And he, he was at her elbow, watching.

The Titan’s shape froze and the sudden tension flowed through the rest of the fireteam. Triads of green sparks ignited bright and hateful in the black of the arcology dome’s depths. Too exposed. They were too exposed. Faster than that thought she took aim at the center of a trio of glowing eyes and they snuffed out with a scream that swamped the echoes of the pistol shot. It was answered by a hundred more cries of fury. Claws, legs, chitin plating seethed in the dark as the rush began.

Their circle of rain glowed, this time with paracausal luminescence. The Warlock drove an open palm at the floor and she could feel his Light seep through her body. “Stay close,” he said, low and calm despite his urgency, “and we’ll hold them.” Her every sensor sang with delight, danger, the need and ability to do violence. Then, she didn’t have to remember.

\---

She was flipping, falling, hurled by an explosion. There was no breath to drive out of her body but she lay still for a moment anyway after impact, struck by the oddity of that thought. A light rain of pulverized rock followed her to the ground. He leaned over her where she fell, trying to help her up. She could picture his mouth beneath the helmet, shouting, “come on, we’re almost there!” but the commlink wasn’t working. Instead of taking his hand, she fired her rifle one-handed past his head. The looming Hive swordsman reeled back away the fusillade of bullets.

This was still after they met, then. Was it the present? She rolled forward to her feet, rifle left behind, to drive a knife into the knight’s neck. Dirty grey chitin split jagged and ichor oozed, slow, from the fatal wound. She used its toppling height as a springboard and with a sweep of her arms hurled a fan of fire into the coterie of acolytes and thralls charging in behind it. The Light passing through her thrilled as she landed among vaporizing corpses. He, he’d already turned away, firing another direction back into the porous-walled cavern. The worn, pumice-like stone, the purple glow of Reef sky at the tunnel mouth: not the present yet, and not what she was looking for.

\---

Green grass bent beneath her gloved fingers on a hilltop under midnight blue sky. Piling clouds lined a dawn horizon composed of ruins like broken teeth. Above, however, the stars held no rain, no taste of dirt and rust and poultry. “And that one, it’s a Hunter.” Not alone, she realized with a start, they were talking, sitting together on this rubble-strewn hill. What had she said? She hadn’t said…? “He’s always a Hunter no matter the source of the tale.” 

She knew it was him even in the dark. She could see the curve of lips, the definition of chin in her mind. His name eluded her. Without his name she couldn’t talk. Beneath the dull, parkerized plate and tough fibrous underlayers of her armor, beneath her torso chassis and all the systems packed within, her chest constricted. Was it a physical sensation, or something fabricated within equally artificial neurons? Misunderstanding her silence, he pointed, then took her hand and lifted it to guide her eyes. “There.”

Their fingers chased the curves of the Hunter’s figure in the starlit sky. “There’s her knife,” she said. Her voice belonged to someone else, like it always did. He, he laughed in agreement with that stranger.

\---

“It was carved in the slab Ghost found me under,” his voice was burred by accent and the static of transmission between their ships. It was a cross-system flight, the fireteam separated into individual cockpits, alone. Another night, another talk. Earlier? “Fausten, Seren, they already know the story. So that’s just what I’ve used.”

“It was actually more of a cornice. Very heavy. Statues, too. Might’ve been a monument.” The interruption was from his fussy drone. Not his drone, his ghost.

Her wrist ached where the numbers were stamped, blurred digits hammered into the metal each on top of the other, one for each of her lives before the long death. No matter how many times this memory returned, no matter how she grasped, she couldn’t remember how it started. What she sought wasn’t here.

\---

When she looked in the mirror, she recognized herself. It was a room in Anchor district she used sometimes, with sunlight and the glow of the Traveler slicing in through the large windows. It belonged to someone else, Reynard, maybe? An unused bed, a desk cluttered with firearm components, the furnishings were an unfamiliar blur.

Her faceplate was umber-enameled over dull metal. The small circle in her forehead plate was the twist lock for her brain-case. Eyes glowed blue in wide sockets, outlined by black ceramic sclera. Even in armor she was slender and here, without, her arms seemed thin, stick-like. Her armor was piled at her feet. She didn’t know why. Simple sky-colored cloth undergarments gave a nod toward fleshly modesty, containing syntex-molded small, high breasts and stretched around the metal frame of her hips above compact, robust thighs wiry with taut myomer bundles. The touch of her fingers brought a response, a heat in her face, in her stomach, that couldn’t be physical.

His lips, teeth, radiant hands, the shine of protectiveness, all the things that she knew, but didn’t know for herself, drifted through the fugue. Sensation grew and overwhelmed until blue light flickered in her mouth to announce the escape of a strangled gasp. She didn’t know that voice, and the illusion of self was broken. Something, something important was still missing. Had they even met yet?

A wisp of vaporous light popped and disgorged a spinning metal diamond. “Cee?” her drone asked with long-suffering concern, “all you alright? You’re safe, you’re in the City.” Not her drone, her ghost.

\---

“Cee!” that was her name, her nickname, really. He, he called it out, running ahead of her, one arm cradling the volatile arc battery in its crook. Unforgiving pavement raced under the maneuvering vanes of her sparrow with the toes of her boots centimeters from roadrash and angling the throttle even harder. The Eliksni ahead braced against the onrushing Guardians with weapons held aloft and already firing. Artificial lights from the surrounding skyscrapers and dappled twilight shaded the street in dangerous illusions of depth and distance. “Catch!”

The sparrow careened out of control when she launched herself standing from the seat. A whisper of Light braced her spine midair and she flipped impossibly high over the city street to catch the sizzling sphere. An Eliksni dreg, docked and cowering, was too slow to avoid the discarded vehicle and died with a truncated shriek that echoed off of the tall buildings. With his hands now free the Warlock jerked his shotgun up on its sling to hammer shot into a servitor before it could rotate its aim to stop her from reaching the shield generator the creatures were protecting. Sparks leapt from the hazy orb of energy, trying to ground in her armor, as its sputtering lifespan collapsed into seconds. Her leap described a delicate parabola and she descended in their midst to slam the arc charge into the delicate machine.

So practiced, that union, so solid. Complete in almost every way. This must almost be the present.

\---

So much was blurred. So little was good, clear. Precious.

What came after the memory of rain was painful confusion. “My contract?” someone else’s voice emerged from her throat, “did I…? Was there another…?” Not even the phantom of memory fled her mind’s pursuit. There was nothing there and the words held no meaning. Some instinct, honed of habitual confusion, lead her to check her wrist. Shaking rubber fingertips wiped mud from metal epidermis to reveal the identifier there, but she couldn’t grasp what it should have meant to her. She didn’t have anything solid, not yet, but it was somewhere, if only she could find it. She stood too long in the rain and sludge, lost, until violence dislodged her.

What followed was muck, spent shell casings, the savage grunts of hulking beasts, screams and blood. Not hers, of course. Injury brought pain, torn plastic, sheared metal, crushed actuators, but not blood and not screams that she recognized. And then her drone would put her back together. Not her drone, her ghost.

\---

Metal and hydraulic-reinforced armor joints creaked when Reynard flexed her back, as if she’d been cramped while trapped within the shadow realm of the Ahamkara’s heart. The strange organ itself was staked on the polished marble altar and leaking black ichor everywhere. “How many times does that make it?” she growled.

“It’s the Curse,” Fausten rolled his ursine shoulders in a shrug. The illusion was completed by his armor’s fur trim. “As many times as it takes. It was our turn this time.” 

Next to the massive Titan, the Warlock stood stoically, seeming no worse for wear from his imprisonment. He, he clapped a friendly hand on her thin shoulder. “Good run, thank you.” She peeked up at him, imagining lips pulled back, teeth bared, smiling, but saw only his faceless and corroded helm.

She had to look away and she could only pant shallowly, without breath, hands on her knees. The final dash through the Queen’s halls exhausted in a way her body could only simulate. She shook off the last vestiges of the Ahamkara’s sinuous presence from her mind. Forgetfulness of its cajoling offers would be a mercy.

“We can make a [bargain],” it would say in a stolen voice, “I know what you [wish]. Just a little slip, that is all it would [take].” And she would run, and keep running, away from that awful need, away from a voice that was horribly hers.

Because she wanted to remember something.

“We’d better make our report to the Queen’s Wrath,” Reynard continued her grousing as she turned to the Warlock, “again. Why don’t you call the ships down from orbit and get us out of here...” Cee’s simulated breath caught, every sensor straining for that word.

\---

Rain. On her twitching fingertips first, thrust out of the dirt. Then on her back when she breached up from the shallow grave with the tatters of armor hanging off her chassis. Then sluicing down her cranial shell and carrying away clinging clods of mud. She tasted the rain that slipped past plastic lips, tasted dirt and tangy rust. There was a little hovering drone shining a light on her. "That's good, but you're not done, we have to get moving." Not a drone, a ghost. 

It was a good, clear memory. Precious.


End file.
